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Thursday, January 15, 2015

My article on Flipkart's Billion Dollar Sale and an article that appeared in a business daily on the preparations that went into it was published in DNA on December 29, 2014.

This is the full text of the article:

An article published on an online news portal (reproduced from a business daily) claimed that "Flipkart's 'Big Billion Day' was planned over more than 700,000 man hours (six months of work put in by 280 people over 14 hours every day) to get the back-end systems ready." This is a stupendous achievement by any yardstick, and all the more creditable given that Flipkart's infrastructure is nothing to scoff at to begin with, and which is rarely known to keel over during traffic surges. Despite all this preparation however, Flipkart didexperience issues during its big sale, which led to its founders issuing a public apology - an act of entrepreneurial humility that was well appreciated by many.

The article states that Flipkart "clocked a gross merchandise value (GMV) of $100 million". But what is "GMV"? According to Investopedia, Gross Merchandise Value, abbreviated as GMV, is "The total value of merchandise sold over a given period of time through a customer to customer exchange site. It is a measure of the growth of the business, or use of the site to sell merchandise owned by others." But there is some confusion as to what GMV actually means. This arises from the fact that GMV is not a standard accounting term. For instance, a search for "GMV" or for "Gross Merchandise Value" on the web site of The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India throws up zero results. GMV's definition differs based on each e-commerce vendor's assumptions. Therefore, if an item's price is marked at Rs 100, and Flipkart sells ten such items for Rs 70 each, is the GMV 700 or Rs 1000? Let us be generous and assume that GMV refers to the total sale value, before discounts - that would make it easier for Flipkart to claim they clocked in a hundred million dollars in GMV. Plus it is the logical thing to do - from a marketing perspective.